- Chapter Eleven -
woodland. There was, of course, the need to provide kindling and stores of firewood
for the domestic hearth. In order to avoid living in a continually smoky atmosphere
it was critical to collect and store fuel not for the current winter but the one follow-
ing and preferably the one two winters away. That wood stocks were a common
feature in any homestead has to be a truism. Obvious places for their storage are
between the ubiquitous four-post settings. Alternatively the fuel could have been
stacked beneath the projecting eaves of the round-houses where it could be kept dry
and also provide greater insulation and protection for the daubed walls. Wood stocks
are notorious for harbouring rodents. On several occasions, on the dismantling of
round-houses, beneath the line of the wall a gully has been formed by the activities
of these fellow travellers. Where wood has been stacked against the outside of the
wall the gully is most pronounced, often going beneath the stakes of the wall itself,
literally removing all archaeological trace of their presence. This gully, without clear
evidence of any wall structure, has been regularly observed. Its presence, however,
does not undermine the wall in such a way that it will fracture; the daub and the
wattle work it protects hold the wall firmly in place even on houses which do not
depend upon an inner construction ring.
The provision of fuel, however, one suspects is a side product from the real work
in the woodlands. This work can be divided into two major elements: the provision
of timber for building and the provision of working wood. In the case of the farmer,
we know from all the excavations of the gargantuan appetite of iron age groups for
specific types of timber. Any general analysis of the posthole evidence will show
three broad categories of post normally used, a diameter of 0.30 m and greater, a
diameter of 0.20 m and a diameter of 0.10 m. In order to create the structures we
believe they built, their need was for straight lengths of timber of at least 3 m and
occasionally 6 or 7 m in length, in other words, trees grown in a carefully managed
plantation where judicious thinning and felling are critical. An oak tree with a
diameter of 0.30 m, from this type of plantation which today is extremely rare, can
range in age from fifty to ninety years old. An ash tree can reach the same girth in
slightly less time but certainly a time spanning at least three, if not four, generations.
The logic, therefore, suggests that the timber woodland being managed was an
investment for future generations, just as the trees felled were an investment from
generations in the past. Given the spread of agriculture from the Neolithic through
the Bronze Age and the land clearance we know to have taken place, the presence of
any 'wildwood' to which the Celtic farmer may have had recourse is clearly unlikely,
if not impossible. In any event the 'wildwood' would be unlikely to provide the kind
of timber required and which we know was used. For the lesser timbers of 0.10 m to
0.20 m in diameter it is not unreasonable to believe that the typical hardwoods, oak,
ash and elm, were coppiced. This process involves the cutting out of the main stem,
allowing suckers to form into stout stems. From one tree coppiced in this way it is
possible to obtain from three to seven good timbers. Virgil, writing in the first cen-
tury Be, speaks of living tree boughs and stems being trained into specific shapes for
the manufacture of ploughs. This is, of course, one further refinement in woodland
management. While the coppicing of ash trees particularly can produce by accident
the right curved shape for a plough beam, it is far easier to train just a stem for the
future - in this particular instance at least twenty years.
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